Last month I stumbled on an online archive that has tons of issues of various newspapers going back many, many years. Including The Pendulum: the student newspaper of Elon University. Or at least it used to be. I've been scrounging around Elon's website and it seems that The Pendulum has gone defunct: a casualty of instant news, social media and streaming video. I hate to see that happen to any newspaper, because there is a priceless value to be had on printed information chronicling a place and its people. It is also a magnificent snapshot of the thoughts and ideas and values of those people. I looked and I looked, but I didn't see any opinion/editorial writing recently on Elon's servers. Having those gone is an immeasurable loss.
Well anyway, I previously found the first op-ed piece I wrote for The Pendulum, about abortion. I hadn't gone searching for any more essays until this afternoon. I came across several more articles. This one aroused some appreciation but also a fair amount of anger, about what I wrote regarding abortion and homosexuality. I was only sharing Mother Teresa's perspective on such matters. It wasn't anything that she herself was not unaccustomed to during her lifetime of service.
So, from the September 25, 1997 edition of The Pendulum, here is my column. Click to enlargen...
2 comments:
For a college newspaper columnist you sure were writing on a whole nother level. I'm impressed.
Thank you. I felt very fortunate to have been given space to turn in an op-ed article every other week or so. At the time there was a wide range of perspectives that were to be found on campus, and I'm speaking of the "conservative and liberal" spectrum (though I don't really fall on that anymore). We wrote, we discussed, we respected one another. One of the best writers I ever saw in a college newspaper was a blue-dyed liberal, and I thoroughly admired him. That kind of TRUE diversity isn't found on most campuses anymore and I know that it's gone from Elon, sadly.
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